ANTONIO MACHADO
This excerpt by Antonio Machado is almost a small philosophical declaration against the ideal of absolute identity. The core axis is the opposition between “rational faith” and “poetic faith”—that is, between a reason that tends to reduce difference to identity and a form of thought that accepts alterity as irreducible.
1. “The other does not exist” — reason as the desire for identity
“The other does not exist: this is rational faith”
Machado calls something quite interesting faith: reason, which usually presents itself as that which opposes faith, also possesses its own acts of faith.
One of them would be the belief that reality is, at its core, intelligible as unity.
Hence:
“Identity = reality”
If something is real, reason wants to be able to identify it, define it, classify it, and incorporate it into a system of identity. What is different appears as something that needs to be explained, assimilated, or reduced.
Here lies a critique quite close to a long philosophical tradition:
- Parmenides: being is one and cannot truly be thought of as non-being.
- Plato: thought seeks to grasp things through intelligible forms.
- Aristotle: identity and non-contradiction are the foundations of thought.
- Hegel, in another key: difference tends to be integrated into a dialectical movement that culminates in a higher form of unity.
Machado is suspicious of this philosophical compulsion for unity.
2. The “other” as that which resists
The most important sentence is perhaps:
“But the other refuses to disappear; it subsists, it persists.”
The other is not simply something we do not yet understand. It is that which remains other even after being understood.
This changes the question considerably.
Reason says:
“If I understand X sufficiently, I will be able to incorporate it into my system.”
Machado responds:
“What if there is something in X that can never be reduced to my system?”
Because of this, a beautiful image appears:
“the hard bone on which reason breaks its teeth.”
The other is the hard bone on which reason breaks its teeth.
It is an anti-totalizing image: there is something in reality that does not allow itself to be consumed by thought.
3. “Essential Heterogeneity of being”
Here lies the properly Machadian core:
“the essential Heterogeneity of being”
Being is not essentially homogeneous; it contains a fundamental heterogeneity.
This is very important because Machado is not simply saying:
“People are different.”
It is something ontological:
difference belongs to the very structure of being.
That is, reality is not first a perfectly constituted unity to which differences subsequently appear.
It is possible to invert the relationship:
difference comes first; unity is a later construction.
This brings Machado closer to several later movements.
4. Heidegger: difference between being and entity
There is an interesting affinity with Heidegger, although Machado is not simply anticipating Heidegger.
Heidegger distrusts the metaphysical tradition that turns being into something that can be completely present, determined, and conceptualized.
Machado also identifies a problem in trying to make reality coincide entirely with what thought manages to grasp.
However, Machado is less ontologically systematic. His path is poetic: he arrives at alterity through human experience and poetry.
5. Levinas: probably the strongest connection
If we want to find a later philosopher who radically develops this intuition, Emmanuel Levinas is a particularly fruitful association.
For Levinas, the Other cannot be reduced to the Same.
Western philosophy would often try to understand the different by transforming it into something I can know:
Other → object of my knowledge → Same.
Levinas wants to preserve precisely what Machado calls:
“incurable otherness”
Alterity is incurable because there is no intellectual operation capable of eliminating it.
The Other is not simply an incomplete version of myself.
It is truly other.
Difference, for Levinas, even has an ethical dimension: the encounter with the other confronts me with something I cannot intellectually possess.
6. Derrida: identity is never completely present
There is also a very strong affinity with Derrida.
Derrida questions the idea of a full presence, of a meaning absolutely identical to itself.
Machado writes:
“everything must necessarily and absolutely be one and the same.”
Derrida could ask: is it possible for anything to be absolutely “the same”?
For Derrida, identity always involves difference. A sign only signifies because it is different from other signs; a presence always contains traces of what is not present.
Therefore, although Machado uses ontological language—being, otherness, oneness—there is an intuition that can be read in a very Derridean way:
identity cannot completely eliminate the difference that constitutes it.
7. Nietzsche: against the “one and the same”
Another important association is Nietzsche.
Nietzsche is deeply suspicious of philosophy's tendency to transform the world into something stable, classifiable, and identical to itself.
For him, concepts like identity, unity, permanence, and substance are often ways of domesticating the flow and multiplicity of reality.
In this sense, Machado's phrase:
“Identity = reality”
could be read as that which Nietzsche precisely wants to question.
The world is multiplicity, conflict, transformation, perspective.
Unity would be a psychological and linguistic need of ours, not necessarily a fundamental property of reality.
8. Bergson: reality against the concept
There is also an interesting parallel with Henri Bergson.
Bergson distinguishes conceptual knowledge—which tends to divide, classify, and stabilize—from the experience of duration, which is continuous, mobile, and qualitatively heterogeneous.
The intellect needs to transform the flow into identifiable things:
this is this; that is that.
But concrete experience is never so perfectly discontinuous.
Machado seems to say something similar: reality always exceeds the categories that attempt to make it identical to itself.
9. And there is a very important opposition: rationality × poetry
However, I think it would be a mistake to read Machado simply as “anti-reason.”
He is not saying:
reason = bad
poetry = good.
What he does is far more interesting.
He says that both reason and poetry possess a “faith.”
The difference lies in what each one believes in.
Rational faith
The real can finally be reduced to identity.
Poetic faith
The real contains an alterity that will never be completely reduced to identity.
Therefore, poetry is not irrationality. It is another form of fidelity to the real.
It remains open to that which the concept cannot absorb.
10. “from which oneness must always suffer”
And perhaps the most philosophically sophisticated phrase is this one:
“the incurable otherness from which oneness must always suffer.”
It does not simply say that unity and difference exist side by side.
It says that unity itself suffers because of alterity.
That is, every attempt to construct an absolute “One” will be haunted by the “Other.”
This could be put this way:
there is no identity without that which it excludes.
And this leads us directly to a vast tradition of 20th-century thought: Levinas, Derrida, Deleuze, Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger, in addition to several strands of phenomenology and post-structuralism.
In summary
I would read the text as a small genealogy of an idea:
Parmenides → unity of being
↓
metaphysics → identity, permanence, non-contradiction
↓
reason → desire to reduce the multiple to the one
↓
Machado → the other resists
↓
Levinas → the Other is irreducible to the Same
↓
Derrida → identity is traversed by difference
↓
Deleuze → difference is not an accident of identity; it is productive and primary
And there is something especially beautiful in Machado's formulation: he does not say that we need to resolve alterity. He calls it “incurable.”
Alterity is a wound that unity can never close.
In this sense, “poetic faith” would precisely be the decision not to close this wound—to accept that perhaps reality is truer when it remains partially other to us.